This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application.
As the number of wireless cellular data communication devices continues to increase and as their data capabilities continue to be more and more heavily used, the usage on the available frequencies dedicated to cellular data communication comes closer and closer to saturation. One approach to the management of traffic load is the offloading of traffic onto unlicensed frequencies, such as those used by wireless local area networks (WLAN), whose presence may be represented by one or more access points (Aps). Network operators may implement wireless network infrastructure, which uses unlicensed frequencies, and manage the transfer of traffic between base stations using licensed frequencies and unlicensed network access points. Such an approach may be used, for example, by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) or LTE-advanced (LTE-A) networks. The efficient use of unlicensed frequencies and the efficient transfer of traffic between base stations using licensed frequencies and access points using unlicensed frequencies has the potential to greatly increase wireless data capacity.